Saturday, 24 November 2012

Electing to Vote

A new Member
of Parliament for Manchester was recently elected and, during the run up to the
election, I happened to see a couple of old documentary films about the City.
The first was a monochrome public information film commissioned by the City
Council in 1946. Its message was "Now that the war is over we are going to
knock down the slums, build new housing, fix the infrastructure and stop
polluting the air". It was backed up by quaint, cardboard cut-out graphics
(state-of-the-art at the time) to illustrate the statistics of taxation and
spending.

The film was
widely distributed to cinemas in the region, as well as being shown to MPs at
Westminster, and is now preserved as an historical document. It is not without
artistic merit, thanks to the talents of its 'bohemian' director, but what
lingers for me is the visual impact of something that was taken for granted at
the time - the grimy condition of all the buildings. Apart from the slums, many
of them had been grandly conceived and splendidly executed, yet all of them appeared
utterly miserable in their overcoats of soot.

.

A second
film, independently made and shot in the neighbouring borough of Salford in
1968, depicted life in the slums twenty two years later. Not much seemed to
have changed - except that the filth could now be seen in colour. I was
transfixed especially by an intimate domestic scene in which a young couple, at
home, bathed their four young children in a tin tub containing six inches of
water laboriously heated over a gas stove in the lean-to masquerading as a
kitchen. Meanwhile, not so far away and all around them, the 'summer of love'
generation (myself included) basked in the sybaritic pleasures of sex and drugs
and rock n roll, unaware or uncaring of their condition. How easy it is to lead
a life blinkered from that of others.

These films
proved to be apt viewing just prior to an election. Their evidence of the
persistence of huge social inequalities over hundreds of years - despite the
enormous wealth Britain had amassed during that time - was quite hard to
comprehend. If you hadn't already got a political view on the subject it
certainly would have helped pull one into focus. If you had, it served as a
reminder that there is never room for complacency.

Meanwhile,
at the hustings, there were twelve hopeful candidates - eleven of whom were either
brave or foolish considering that just one party has held the seat ever since rain
began to fall on Manchester. I was actually impressed by all of them as individuals.
They uniformly professed honesty and integrity. Not one of them put forward an
argument in favour of social inequality (so where it comes from is a mystery).
All of them wanted a better life for everyone - except the Communist League
candidate who, having long ago decided that the population comprises just two
types - workers and bosses - would clearly have preferred the total elimination
of the latter. In the event, out of an electorate of 91,692, he persuaded 64
people to vote for him.

I was
impressed by the sensible arguments of the candidate for the People's
Democratic Party - despite the fact that he was from Yorkshire - but, with only
71 votes, he got 7 fewer than the Monster Raving Looney Party - who do not have
a sensible argument between them. I was also seduced by the Pirate Party
candidate's enthusiastic exhortation to rid ourselves of the yoke of Big Brother
but, on reflection, found it difficult to envision him as part of a credible
government with grown-up ministers and so on.

So, the end
result was a predictably massive win for the incumbent party. But the desperately
low turnout (just 18% of the electorate) was an even more impressive triumph
for apathy. Perhaps the turnout could be boosted at the next election by
putting those films on general release a few weeks beforehand?